A. Field of the Invention
The principles of the invention relate generally to network traffic control and, more particularly, to the control and management of multicast replication channels.
B. Description of Related Art
In an increasingly networked world, digital networks are being used to deliver additional data services to end-users. End-users may receive video and audio streams over a network, such as a packet-based network. IPTV (Internet Protocol Television), for instance, is a system where a digital television service is delivered to subscribing consumers using Internet Protocol (IP) over a broadband connection.
IPTV is typically delivered as live TV using a multicasting technique. Multicast generally refers to the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously. In multicasting, to conserve bandwidth, traffic should ideally be transmitted over each link of the network only once. Copies of the traffic may be created only when the links to the destinations split. In comparison with multicast, point-to-single-point delivery is called unicast. When unicast is used to deliver traffic to several recipients, a copy of the traffic is sent from the sender to each recipient. The network bandwidth savings using multicasting techniques as opposed to unicast techniques can be significant, and can become particularly important in high bandwidth applications, such as IPTV.
When multicasting IPTV traffic (or other high bandwidth traffic), in order to conserve network bandwidth, it is important to replicate the traffic at a point in the network that is as close as possible to the subscribers. It may also be desirable to implement policies relating to subscribers, such as network access control, farther upstream in the network.